The Finnish language

Finnish (suomi) is a Uralic language (thus, unlike most languages in Europe, it is not Indo-European) belonging to the Finnic branch of the family along with Estonian, with which it is not mutually intelligible, and a few other languages. The language is also considered to be a distant relative of Hungarian too.

Finnish is spoken by over 5 million people. Gramaticaly, Finnish is a transitional language between an agglutinating and a fusional language, with some degree of inflectional morphology affecting verbs.

Historically, Finnish developed as an oral language. Even in its early periods, it was in contact with Germanic languages and, as a result, Finnish acquired a range of Germanic loanwords, such as 'kuningas' ('king'), 'koulu' ('school'), etc. Finnish remained an oral language throughout the Middle Ages, because Middle Low German dominated in trade, then, after the 13-th century conquering of Finland by Sweden, Swedish dominated in trade and administration in Finland. In the 16th century, Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop, developed a writing system for Finnish. The new writing system was based on the orthography of Swedish, German, and Latin, and it was created so as to enable the translation of the Bible to Finnish. In 1809, Finland became part of the Russian Empire on the rights of autonomy. However, that did not stop the 19th century Romantic creation of Finnish nationalism. In 1835, an epic named 'Kalevala' was published in Finnish by Elias Lönnrot, and the language begins a gradual revival. When Finland gained independence in 1917, Standard Finnish was developed out of the Western dialects spoken in Finland.

Finnish is widely renowned for its alleged difficulty, but actually Finnish has a surprisingly regular grammar (including its case system, despite having 15 cases), it's almost entirely phonetic (meaning it's written as it's spoken) and also its phonology is easy: the first syllable always takes the main stress (in contrast to such Baltic languages as Lithuanian, for example, where stress jumps all the time). Moreover, Finnish has no articles or grammatical gender.

About Finnish conjugation

Conjugation is a process by which Finnish verbs are modified from their basic forms so as to make their meaning more precise.

number (are we talking about a single person like in 'ottaa' - 'she/he takes', or many: 'ottavat' - 'they take'),

tense (Finnish distinguishes between the present and past tenses),

negativity (the conjugation depends on whether a verb is negative or positive - this is also encountered in English to some extent, although such changes are usually considered less formal or dialectal - for example, "are" and "ain't"),

voice (indicates the actor, and can be active or passive, e.g. 'tietää' - 'knowns' vs. 'tiedettäessä' - 'is being known').

In the Finnish Cooljugator, we try to provide you as many of these factors as possible, although we also try to focus on the most important aspects of conjugation. Moreover, we always try to show how forms relate to one another (see the verb tree above).